John Croson's Blog Home

I've been tasked this week to review an R:Base database that is used to parse data from one of our clients, and output it into a usable form for our Misys Tiger server. It's had many little menu items added to it to perform data manipulation over the years, and never really been used to it's full potential. I'm more of a VBA/VB guy, and would rather get this done using Access, but only have a couple of weeks to clean it up before the poor guy that currently has to use this goes on vacation, when I will presumably step in to "scrub and screen" data for interfacing into Misys. Wow, what a clunky piece of stuff. I'm using v6.5, which is quite old, circa 1999 I think. Lots of functions and methods to learn, which is doing to my eyes what pouring salt into would do just quicker... ;-). I'm finding virtually no newsgroup info, and they've removed most legacy application information from their website. *sigh* Guess I'll have to post my questions t...

I'm soooo embarrassed about this, but compelled to share it. I have an eBay account, like many of us do, which is linked to PayPal, which in turn is linked to my bank account. My wife and I share my eBay account, because it seems to make sense, since we share everything else in our lives. Today she was checking her email, and it was from eBay, with a message about some item she bid on, and she'd be reported if she didn't respond. I thought this was strange, since her email account isn't listed on our eBay account, but thought we'd check it out. *This is where my brain was simply not engaging correctly.* My wife, however, did say, "Honey, why would I get this email?", and "Isn't this strange?". WHY DON'T I LISTEN? Testosterone? Age? No, just plain STUPIDITY... The links in the frighteningly familiar email went to a cleverly crafted website that asked for user/pass information to the account. "Strange, that password isn't wor...

Wow. I've really had LOTS of hits generated on this blog, since I posted some info about SEPM and my related issues, so I've decided to share some tips and other interesting findings. My guess is that many of you that hit my blog don't have the luxury of having a DEV environment to test in, so PLEASE do yourself a favor, and if you do nothing else, follow #7 and #8. This will prevent you from having to invest in the Hair Club for Men after you yank all yours out. Tips: SEPM doesn't like to be installed on custom HTTP ports, but it is possible. See 'Configuring the Symantec Endpoint Protection Manager to run with a custom HTTP port' Document ID: 2007111212591048 here . It's a pretty simple process. SEPM will not show graphics from RDP sessions....seriously. So don't put yourself in a situation as I did, and hang on the helpline-from-hell with someone that didn't know, nor did the knowledge-base. DOH! If you have to upgrade SEPM, God help you. I used...

So today I'm trying to clean up a Symantec Endpoint Protection client install that went bad, and here's what I get during the uninstall process... Is it really gonna take this long? Can I make a pot of coffee stretch that far? Will my kids start college before this completes? In truth, this quickly went to 11 M$ minutes, then to 1 M$ minute. First time I've EVER seen anything like that before.

I'd done quite a bit of research into online photo sharing sites, and found SmugMug to be the best option. I won't go into granular details of feature differences, because there seems to be to many to wade through. I did however, use this site for feature comparisons. The final two determining factors were price and whether there was a clear way my data was backed up. Nowhere on dotPhoto's site did I see any notation of hot-site, or backups, just that I could order a DVD of my data whenever I liked. That didn't particularly give me warm fuzzies. Another thing I like about SmugMug is that you can use 3rd party software to post your images. iPhoto, Photoshop, or in my case, Linux and Picasa2. Works like a champ, along with the Firefox SmugManager plugin from J. Rinaldi , which is very slick. Gives you oodles of account setting options for your SmugMug account right on your browser toolbar. You see, the main reason for the move to post to a site like SmugMug was that ou...

My SEPM server decided to do the BSOD the other night, at about 2:00am. Nice. Right when a few users from India were working on the server, which also happens to be our Terminal Server. Thankfully, I didn't get a call. I can't wait until MR2 comes out. Some of the touted improvements is a lighter weight processor footprint, fixed graphics (mine ALWAYS work at the console, just not remotely...), and I'm sure numerous other fixes. I hope I don't have to run around the office yet AGAIN to use their sylink tool reconnect my clients. I had originally scripted it, but it doesn't work if you impose password protection on the UI...hmph... I'd also found that logging on some of the clients was out of control. Saw many posts on Symantec's user forums to this affect, and my uninstalling and reinstalling seemed to fix that, for now.

There are quite a few tutorials on the internet about Indexing Service, but I found none that showed me all of what I planned to accomplish in my environment. This prompted me to write this HowTo. Microsoft's description of it is "Indexing Service is a base service for Microsoft® Windows® 2000 or later that extracts content from files and constructs an indexed catalog to facilitate efficient and rapid searching.". My goal was to leverage this technology to aid my users in searching for documents in our network shares. We have a number of them, and I've found that even if you attempt to promote good "house cleaning" rules, you invariably end up with a mass of documents that can become difficult to circumnavigate. This usually results in frequent phone calls like, "Have you seen this?". Nope, haven't seen it, but if you call Bill, I bet he knows... While MS Indexing Service, or Desktop Search, works well when tuned properly for the end u...